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Hard.
Fast.
It was as if time itself had shattered, and the world was a jumble of jagged edges and broken shards.
My body strained against the seat belt, held in a painful limbo between movement and restraint.
A symphony of pain erupted as my muscles tensed, the force of the collision coursing through every fiber of my being. I was weightless and weighty all at once, suspended in a space where a split second felt like an eternity.
And then the airbag erupted like a brutal awakening. A relentless explosion of white-hot force, it slammed into me with an unforgiving violence. The impact drove me back against the seat, and my head collided with a merciless hardness.
Stars burst in my vision, a kaleidoscope of agony and confusion.
And then my world went black.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Heidi
My ears were ringing.
The sound brought me up from the darkness, louder and louder. It was a sound I had not heard in a very long time. A sound that should have been accompanied by a horrid pain in my ears, but here, there was no pain, no body. Just sound.
I floated in it, like the sound itself was carrying me. Higher and higher.
The pain came next, not in my ears but at the back of my head. A throbbing that traveled down my body to my stomach where the sensation twisted and turned into nausea.
The ringing.
The throbbing.
The roiling.
I gasped and tried to reach for my head to somehow quell the sensations, but my hands wouldn’t budge.
Paralyzed.
The word chilled me to the bone and sent my lungs racing for air.
I tried again, and this time I felt the hardness that encircled my wrists, trapping them, keeping my hands from doing what I demanded of them.
I nearly sighed in relief until it dawned on me what was trapping them.
Shackles.
I was lying on my side on something hard and rough with my hands shackled to something behind my back. The arm beneath me was nearly numb, sending prickles all the way from my fingers to my shoulder.
It took far more effort to force my eyelids open than it should have. They felt weighted, and every second it took made the throbbing and ringing worse.
When I’d managed to drag them open, the world around me appeared out of focus, so I blinked, then blinked again.
Concrete. There was a concrete wall inches in front of my face, the rough texture and the cracks that ran through it clear as day now.
My heart beat harder. It took no time to make sense of the wall, the shackles, the throbbing. And though I had no name, no face to put to the culprit, I hadn’t a doubt in my mind why I was here. They had a “problem”—the hidden money—and they intended to fix it.
But what had they done with Amadeo?
I lifted my head up, searching, but there was only a concrete wall in front of me. I tugged on my shackles. They were tight around my wrists, but whatever they were secured to, there was some give to it.
